Suddenly Microsoft is the Hippest Tech Company Around
theatlanticwire.com
theatlanticwire.com
When I see Microsoft's new ads, I still cringe. It's just a veiled "developers, developers, developers" thing. It still feels like the rich nerd trying to act like the cool kid. It just doesn't work, and Microsoft should realize that.
Why are the marketing-heads so interested in "rebranding" anyway? I personally don't understand image campaigns.
Actions, not words, Microsoft. Give us more things like Xbox 360 and Kinect (or half of the stuff Research comes up with), less lame attempts to make me "aware" of your cool work on Internet Explorer. If you want me to use your product, make it kick the ass of its competitors in my head. You won't convince me based upon your silly marketing anymore. I've been hurt by that a couple of times before.
I am glad IE has finally started to come around to be a browser worth using, but the unfortunate fact of the matter is that I think these "hip" commercials are targeted toward people that are mostly off of the whole Windows game by now anyway. The problem here is that Microsoft is too late. The Lumia looks beautiful, IE doesn't look bad, but Apple already ate their mobile market and IE had its chance in 2005 when Microsoft didn't seem to take Mozilla seriously.
First, Microsoft's status as a "cool" or, at least, "not eyeball-gougingly awful" company is inversely proportional to the power they wield over customers. MS was universally loathed when they were forcing people to use their browser and when it wasn't possible to do any meaningful consumer computing without paying the Windows tax. Now that we don't have to use MS software, MS are having to make software that people might actually use by choice. It's very hard for a dominant company to avoid becoming evil (cf. Google), but the flip-side is that once the dominance fades away the company has to start competing on merit again.
Second, MS in 1997 were competing with Netscape (cool startup), Sun (hippies) and IBM (erm...). Now they're competing, and often successfully, with Facebook (evil), Apple (enormous) and Google (evil and enormous). Today's 20-year-old college student was six years old during the "browser wars" anti-trust trial and isn't going to hold grudges for it. Today's Microsoft is sort of like late 90s IBM - dull, slightly confused and often irrelevant, but it's not exactly evil; XBox/Kinect is a genuinely good product, and Windows Phone is actually innovative rather than an iPhone clone; Bill Gates has morphed from a dystopian monopolist plutocrat into your genial wealthy uncle who spends his time trying to cure malaria and tackle poverty, more famous for giving his money away than for the means by which he amassed it.
None of this means that Microsoft is now the hippest tech company around, but it does explain how they might become so and why that wouldn't be a bad thing.
As for "used to be the evil one", I note they managed to keep the money they extorted out of our industry, with almost no reparations to the innovators they excluded from the market via threats and kickbacks. And they're starting to clone Apple's dystopian walled garden.
Do we live on the same planet? The feeling I got right after the consumer beta was that it was generally hated. And wasn't Win7 quite acclaimed?
1. Come out with better, more insightful products. This is something it actually is doing: 360, Windows Phone and Windows 8 all look awesome. I would be very happy for Balmer to leave and for him to be replaced by J Allard (Entertainment and Devices head that left/was forced out). From the outside looking in, it looked like Allard had vision, he knew how to execute, and he knew the culture the company needed to cultivate to achieve it. Xbox and Windows Phone was out of E&D, as well as the canned-but-great-looking Courier.
2. Have better ad campaigns. Across all divisions, the ad campaigns have been uniformly awful.
3. Keep executing cleanly. No company is past redemption, but Microsoft's history is not good. They need to keep being good citizens. Trust takes time, but it's very easy to lose it (see Yahoo!).
A corollary of this point is that their Windows 8 "everything is metro" broad-brush attitude is going to bite them in the ass. Case in point: Windows 8 Server - the interface in the beta is horrendous.
Someone wise once said: "God is in the details". They need to realize that they can't just take an idea like the Metro inteface and slap it onto their server product... the result will be tragic.
Instead, they should take the "Metro" vision, and fabricate a server version. A good example of this would be the work that Apple has done "iOS-ifying" OSX. You can argue whether this is a worthwhile path to take, but all of the features were whitelisted after a) making sure they were true to where they wanted to take the OS, and b) ensuring it looked and worked decent (even if there was lost functionality from a previous version).
We saw a glimpse of that with the Kinect.
And .NET has better libraries to deal with asynchronous programming, Task uses continuation passing and each thread has it's own "event loop" with SynchronizationContext, it's really simple to switch between them, Java has all sort of mixes, some API's use pooling, some use continuations, and you have to mess around with Executors since there is no equivalent to SynchronizationContext. Also RX is a wonderful abstraction on event streams. Java can't even consider this sort of API's because it has no lambdas/extension methods, and this reflects in JVM libraries.
What prevents them from being anywhere near "hip" is their past/present actions and our memory.
"Over the last few days we've seen Hotmail ads running on Boing Boing and Jezebel, two blogs that are hip for different reasons."
Running ads on blogs is not the same as getting endorsed by said blogs.
"Windows 8 surprised and excited the tech blogger world, something a Windows browser hasn't done since Windows 95."
I normally don't like to nit, but Win8 isn't a browser. What kind of reporting is this? I would excuse it except she spent the previous paragraph talking about IE9.
"The company has some other exciting things going on inside its labs."
Such as? So.cl? Docs.com? It would be nice for this 'journalist' piece to have some commentary to explain this position.
"Appl[sic] still produces insane-popular gadgets, but no longer wows reviewers like it once did"
I also don't like to nit on spelling mistakes, but this one just irks me. I make spelling and grammar mistakes a lot of time. I really do. But I also don't write articles for a living or pretend to be a journalist.
No, what prevents them is their "Microsoft is a windows company" mantra that Ballmer reiterated recently. Windows is not hop, it's not the 90s.
Furthermore - Microsoft is and has always been an "enterprise" company. Windows = decent enterprise product line(s), and Office (esp. Excel) is a powerful, possibly indispensable business tool. But consumer-oriented it is not. Absent a huge change in management focus, they will never be... they have billions of reasons each year not to.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Power_Shell
One could even argue it's better in some ways, for example: "PowerShell differs from Unix/Linux in that .NET objects are passed between stages in the pipeline instead of text. This eliminates the need to explicitly parse text output.
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_command_shells